Word: sodden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...afternoon's close, the teams had grown indistinguishable, a constant, chilling rain having rendered the field a sodden, gelatinous plain, unfit for any athletic endeavor, except, perhaps, brown-water canoeing...
...surprisingly, the House masters eventually took a more pragmatic view. If a local liquor merchant, upset with the Houses' flippant dismissal of the law, complained to authorities, or if a sodden teenager raising trouble mentioned he'd gotten the booze at Harvard, it would be the masters' heads rolling. Masters are not the legal guardians of college students, but the House system sets them up in loco parentis. The House masters could therefore not afford to let students run their own happy hours, no matter how discriminate in serving the students promised to be. The potential for a lawsuit...
...dwarfish cripple of exalted birth, absinthe-sodden and dead at 37, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was perhaps the most spectacular peintre maudit of the late 19th century: a doomed dog of modernism, fit for Hollywood. No reputation can quite survive a movie like Moulin Rouge, and ever since its release in 1953 the popular image of Toulouse-Lautrec has been shaped by the sight of Jose Ferrer, legs bound, peering with lugubriously feigned interest up at the boiler-plated buttocks of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Thus Toulouse-Lautrec became one of the few artists most everyone has heard of, a guarantee...
...sounds and sights and terrors of a world that touches the sky. He observes that crampons (metal spikes attached to the soles of climbing boots) on frost make "the crunching sound of someone eating corn on the cob," then watches the benign sun become treacherous, turning glacier snow to sodden mush. His observations on climbing style might save a few bones: "Holding on to pitons is considered bad form but, as I see it, it beats falling." As a lagniappe, Bernstein answers the non-climber's classic question...
Having long concentrated on northerly climes, scientists know little more about the monsoon than did the old Arab traders who named the awesome wind mausam, or season. In fact there are not one but two monsoons every year. Rolling off the tropical seas from the southwest, the sodden summer winds unleash torrential rains that give life to crops across India-and take human lives as swollen rivers flood towns (this year's toll: at least 900 dead, 3 million homeless). Reversing themselves after an autumn lull, the winds return, this time from the northeast, carrying cool, relatively...